An Arctic sketch by Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris sold for $1.8 million, far beyond its pre-sale estimate of $300,000 to $500,000, at the Sotheby's Canada auction.

Sotheby's Canada saw big losses Monday at a Toronto auction of paintings, selling only 60 per cent of the 225 lots available for purchase, suggesting that economic troubles have reached the art world.

The fall auction sold $8.4 million worth of art, well below the $9.5 to $13.5 million range its organizers had expected.

Sotheby's Canada president David Silcox told CTV News that he was proud of the sale, even if it was below what had been predicted.

"The exciting thing is that we actually had quite a good sale," he said.

"Whatever the figures say, we sold $8.4 million worth of art -- that's well above the level we were at five years ago."

But Silcox admitted to The Canadian Press that his auction typically sells 90 per cent of its lots, which he said was "a significant loss."

Much of what didn't sell came from the lower-end of the price spectrum, something that Silcox said didn't surprise him.

"When the market gets tough the way it is now with people worried about the international situation in the financial markets ... the bottom part of the market gets soft quite fast," he said.

The auction house had cut back its prices to come in line with an ever-tightening economy. But not everyone was depressed about the falling prices.

Collector Bill Wilder said he got a "reasonable purchase" when he paid $95,000 for a landscape painting by Canadian artist Henrietta Mabel May.

"The estimates (for the painting), I think, were between $80,000 and $120,000, and I bought it for $95,000," Wilder told CTV News. "So I'm very pleased."

And veteran art buyer David Loch said the fact that prices had fallen wasn't an entirely bad thing for the art world.

"The bottom-end got hammered here and quite a lot of things didn't sell," Loch told CTV News.

"That's very healthy for the market."

Loch, who helped the late David Thomson acquire much of his personal art collection, bought a David Browne Milne painting called "Woman with a Suitcase" for $475,000.

He told The Canadian Press that the adjustment in prices would bring some art collectors back to reality.

"I think that's a very healthy thing for the market because we've been going up for so long now, people don't know what a down market is," Loch said.

"With (the financial crisis) we're in internationally now, art can't escape it."

Some of the items on the block managed to do better than they were expected to do, despite the trying circumstances.

A Lawren Harris landscape of Nerke, Greenland, sold for $1.8 million, more than three times the upper-end of its pre-sale estimate of $300,000 to $500,000.

Its final price tag, when the buyer's premium was accounted for, was $2,072,500.

Other items that sold above their asking price included the $160,000 purchase of a Gershon Iskowitz abstract painting that soared more than $100,000 above its pre-sale estimate, and an oil-on-canvas painting from Group of Seven artist Frederick Varley that more than quadrupled its expected price at $110,000.